Commerce Tomorrow

From founding Lieferando.de (acquired by TakeAway.com), to being an investor in many tech startups, to now founding and being CEO of Talon.One, Christoph has been at the forefront of the startup scene in Berlin. In this episode, we discuss his founding of Lieferando.de, the Berlin startup scene, the German venture capital market, and his founding/running of Talon.One. Talon.One offers promotions-as-a-service (API-based, multi-tenant, SaaS) to companies including Ticketmaster, Mercedes-Benz, Casper, Zipcar, and more

The Yes, founded by Amit Aggarwal (ex Google/Microsoft, ex-Bloomreach CTO, expert in AI) and Julie Bornstein (ex-Stitch Fix COO), offers an entirely new approach to shopping with its app-first, AI-based personalized shopping experience. Using more than 500 auto-generated attributes per product, The Yes is able to help shoppers find exactly what they're looking for. It's an entirely new approach to shopping that can be quite addictive! In this episode, Dirk and Kelly talk through Amit's time at Microsoft/Google/Groupon, how he and team applied AI to commerce, and some of the initial findings/results from their time live. For more background on The Yes, see https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/20/former-stitch-fix-coo-julie-bornstein-just-took-the-wraps-off-her-app-only-e-commerce-startup-the-yes/

In this episode, Dirk and Kelly sit down with Bob Howland (CDO) and Gireesh Sahukar (Sr Director, Digital Technology) of Dawn Foods to discuss how they built an all-new Digital Innovation Hub in Boston and built an entirely new digital commerce platform from scratch. Dawn Foods is an enormous multi-national company that sells baking supplies to bakeries, world's largest retailers and convenience store chains. Their new platform leverages microservices, APIs, and other cutting-edge technology running atop Google Cloud to offer their customers a single place to engage with Dawn Foods across their entire lifecycle.

If you're a listener to this podcast you probably know Adam as the preeminent eCommerce recruiter in our space. He's placed thousands of technical and business folks in the eCommerce industry, from fresh college grads to C-level execs at both brands and vendors. In this podcast, we discuss the business model of recruiting, how recruiting has changed over time, what brands and vendors look for in candidates, how candidates can better stand out to potential employers, the future of resumes, and more

Matt has been at the forefront of commerce in his C-level positions at BigMachines (acquired by Oracle), Steelbrick (acquired by salesforce) and Salesforce's Quote-to-Cash cloud. He also co-founded G2 Crowd. He is now CEO at Threekit, which generates product images for companies like Crate & Barrel and provides cutting edge AR for commerce, which you can see for yourself at https://quickdemo.threekit.com/product/1 (on a mobile device)

From designing planes, to designing rockets, to being one of the founders of the Java programming language, Dr. Robert Zores has seen it all. In this episode, Dirk and Kelly talk to him about his six years at REWE Digital. REWE is Germany's 3rd largest employer, employs 400,000 people across Europe, and has annual turnover of €63 billion. In 2014 REWE established "REWE Digital" and hired Robert as CTO to provide software and services to the entire REWE group. Robert and the management team then adopted a Spotify-style organizational model, built out hundreds of microservices, and built most of the IT entirely in-house.

Eli, an expert on computational logistics and veteran of Tumblr, Shutterstock and other prominent search innovators, has co-founded Constructor.io, an AI search startup that's built an entirely new search engine from scratch. Used by Sephora, Bonobos, and others, Constructor.io is on the leading edge of search tech and discusses how search engines actually work behind the scenes, what "AI" search actually means, build vs. buy, and the shortcomings of traditional search engines like Elasticsearch and Solr.

What is the scope of a modern OMS? How does an OMS fit in with an ERP, WMS, and a commerce platform? In this episode, we'll go deep on OMSes, talk about how Fluent Commerce is adding support for Coronavirus-related requirements, and what it's like to build a company in Australia

In this episode, we go deep on marketplaces with the preeminent marketplace expert - Mirakl co-founder/co-CEO Adrien Nussenbaum. In this episode, we explore the various flavors of marketplaces, where the lines is between commerce platform and marketplace platform, the role of B2B marketplaces, how to avoid the commoditization trap, and more.

Gartner and Forrester have an enormous amount of influence in the commerce vendor landscape but not that much is known about them. In this interview, Kelly and Dirk chat all things analysts with Andrew Hsu, managing director and co-founder of Spotlight, a firm devoted solely to improving relationships with analysts. We cover who the top analyst firms are for commerce, their business model, how they hire and evaluate analysts, what analysts do on a daily basis, reports like Magic Quadrants and Waves, and why legacy vendors do so well with these reports.